Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics

Real Estate guitarist Matthew Mondanile returns with more warbly dream soundtracks, this time veering closer to the brighter guitar-pop of his other band.

The uptick in bedroom musicians slotting cassette tapes into dusty four-tracks and coating their music with thick layers of distortion reached its apogee in the past year. It's difficult to sift through any music content online without stumbling across reams of opaque artists blurring out the world, many of whom were tied together under the "hypnagogic pop" banner. Real Estate guitarist Matthew Mondanile is one such musician, principally for his work as Ducktails. Fortunately, and perhaps wisely, considering the glut of soupy material out there, Arcade Dynamics is a step away from the nebulous constructs of Ducktails' last full-length record Landscapes. Instead, it edges closer to the conventional song structures of Mondanile's work in his other band.

Unlike Landscapes, there's a great shaft of light cleaved through this album, a loosening up of the murk that beautifully corroded Mondanile's prior work. Similarly, the harkening back to 1980s video game soundtracks and half-remembered VHS ephemera has been condensed down to a few songs ("The Razor's Edge", "Arcade Shift"). Perhaps Mondanile was wary of the current genre clog, or maybe the chance to stretch into bigger venues via the upwardly curved Real Estate touring schedule inspired him to saturate his music with more space. Either way, this is a subtle refraction of the Ducktails aesthetic, where the brittle abstraction and detours down lo-fi cul-de-sacs are siphoned into songs that are breezier, less inward looking, more in thrall to the possibilities of pop.

Album opener "In the Swing" signifies the general thrust, with a Tropicália-inflected guitar thrum shoved to the fore, and the filmy tape damage less obtrusive than before. Not that this is a vast leap in production values; the drums on "Hamilton Road" sound like someone thwacking away on a cardboard box, and "Sprinter" is set to a thin slurry of drum machine noise. But the difference in vocal delivery is pronounced, with Mondanile widening his scope, from the deep Elvis Costello drawl of "Hamilton Road" to the wistful hankering of "Sunset Liner". Similarly, the guitar tones offer a broader range, including country-fied plucking, squelched-out wah-wah dynamics, and the crystal clean jazz-pop inclinations the Sea and Cake veer toward.

Arcade Dynamics peaks over two tracks. "Killin the Vibe" is driven by Mondanile's milky Hawaiian guitar lilt and a pensive summertime-at-dusk chorus flooded with stacked-up vocal harmonies. Panda Bear appears on an alternate take of this track, further elevating it with bursts of peppy vocalizing, although his contribution simply serves as a saccharine bolster to its perfectly understated pop goodness. The sweetly melancholy "Art Vandelay" is the twin highlight here, where the sound is scooped into an irresistibly catchy verse/chorus/verse structure that further blurs the lines between Ducktails and Real Estate, especially as the latter has performed this song. If further proof were needed of Ducktails' malleability, Arcade Dynamics ends with another bend in the road, the 10-minute improv amble through "Porch Projector", which severs open another possible world in which Mondanile could reconfigure this ever-evolving project.